Magic Mountain

Since first encountering images of magnified thin sections of rock (probably something rather grey and uniform in plain sight, like basalt or granite, but transformed into a glittering wonderland of false-coloured, kaleidoscopic energy when viewed through the microscope) I have found those crystalline forms, and the slow but massive growth and crushing collisions they represented, endlessly engaging. Often the images look printed or drawn, with a graphic quality to the black lines loosely encapsulating bright colours, and dark smudges where parts of a crystal go ‘extinct’ when viewed at one angle or another. The individual grains, which might be a matter of microns in diameter, contain so much detail that each brightly coloured chunk or shard could potentially be as big as a boulder or a mountain emerging from the darkness of the polarised slide.

Magic Mountain rescales this experience – the room becomes the slide; the forms hovering in the dark space are part of a colourful and active whole, yet distinct, unique pieces which can be contemplated individually. It considers, too, the practice of collection and display of natural specimens (and the desire to control nature through classification), while taking the products of decomposed mountains – clay and glazes – on a ceramic journey towards a fanciful version of their former mineral state.

Magic Mountain is presented with thanks to NAVA. The Australian Artists’ Grant is a NAVA initiative, made possible through the generous sponsorship of Mrs Janet Holmes à Court and the support of the Visual Arts Board, Australia Council for the Arts.